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If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

O. Henry

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O. Henry
Age: 47 †
Born: 1862
Born: September 11
Died: 1910
Died: June 5
Journalist
Writer
Greensboro
North Carolina
William Sydney Porter
Olivier Henry
Oliver Henry
Write
Stories
Writing
Never
Pleases
Please
Public
Forget
Story

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History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
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In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.
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There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl.
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There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
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Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.
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It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.
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We can't buy one minute of time with cash if we could, rich people would live longer.
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Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.
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O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
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I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands.
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Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy passes your way, you must feed him before you shoot him.
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Take of London fog 30 parts malaria 10 parts, gas leaks 20 parts, dewdrops gathered in a brickyard at sunrise 25 parts odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix. The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle.
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In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out.
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Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.
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When I see a shipwreck, I like to know what caused the disaster...I learned nothing but the glow that wrapped her face when the soup came. That's the story.
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If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. Little old New York's good enough for us--that's what they sing.
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It's said that love makes the world go around. Let me tell you, the announcement lacks verification. It's the wind from the dinner horn that does it.
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Women's weapon, water-drops.
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There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age youth's burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.
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It ain't the roads we take it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.
O. Henry